Really bad loading times even on NVME

[GamezombieLP]

I tried clearing the DX Cache, did optimizations in launcher and the loading times are still horrible even on NVME it feels like I have the game on really old HDD.
Any more tips or maybe fix?

[Nekomian]

What system specs do you have? CPU and RAM timings are still a bit important here too since an underpowered CPU won't be able to utilize the speeds an NVME can offer / put the data in RAM very quickly, especially if it's doing a lot of work. Also, what NVME drive is it? Some have had some firmware issues lately, I doubt it's that but never hurts to check.

[GamezombieLP]

29 minutes ago, Naroxas44 said:

What system specs do you have? CPU and RAM timings are still a bit important here too since an underpowered CPU won't be able to utilize the speeds an NVME can offer / put the data in RAM very quickly, especially if it's doing a lot of work. Also, what NVME drive is it? Some have had some firmware issues lately, I doubt it's that but never hurts to check.

R7 1700 stock on AsRock X370 Killer SLI, 16GB@2933Mhz, GTX 1060 6G factory OC, WD Black SN750 500GB for system and WD Blue SN550 2TB is where I have Warframe. I have SATA SSD and HDD as well, but that info is probably not needed. For Warframe it's plenty of performance.
EDIT: I've patched UEFI with the fixes and I'm on W11 Pro without workarounds. (TPM on MB)

[Nekomian]

4 minutes ago, GamezombieLP said:

R7 1700 stock on AsRock X370 Killer SLI, 16GB@2933Mhz, GTX 1060 6G factory OC, WD Black SN750 500GB for system and WD Blue SN550 2TB

So the SN550 looks fine, I'm not sure what slot you have it in on this motherboard, as the Ultra M.2 Socket (M2_1) it has supports PCIE Gen 3x4 (max of the drive) while the other one (M2_2) is only Gen 2x2. It shouldn't matter too much here, but would result in some load time differences depending on the slot it's installed in.

Do you have your RAM downclocked as well, or are you using XMP (or whatever AMD's equivalent of that is, I think EXPO if it has that as well)? It looks like the R7 1700 only supports a max of DDR4-2666 MHz, and I've read that it's hit or miss with that CPU's memory controller (it can degrade performance if it's constantly having to resend data due to errors). I'd try to set it to 2666 Mhz if possible, even just as a test to see if that helps improve things. If it's already set at that then it's probably fine to leave as is.

Outside of that, the only "limiting" factor here is just the CPU is a bit older, from 2017; it still turbos up to 3.7Ghz (one core, or 3.2Ghz all cores) and has 8 cores, so that's still relatively fast for just file transfers from disk to RAM for loading purposes. I'd check the stuff mentioned above, and link like a video if you could (just so I could see how long it's taking) to help demonstrate if it's like a specific area or just a more general thing. I'm not sure how old the disk is either, but there's always the possibility it's going bad too, but that's like the last thing to consider since that wouldn't be specific to just one game or anything and it's generally very noticeable on SSDs.

[GamezombieLP]

11 minutes ago, Naroxas44 said:

So the SN550 looks fine, I'm not sure what slot you have it in on this motherboard, as the Ultra M.2 Socket (M2_1) it has supports PCIE Gen 3x4 (max of the drive) while the other one (M2_2) is only Gen 2x2. It shouldn't matter too much here, but would result in some load time differences depending on the slot it's installed in.

Do you have your RAM downclocked as well, or are you using XMP (or whatever AMD's equivalent of that is, I think EXPO if it has that as well)? It looks like the R7 1700 only supports a max of DDR4-2666 MHz, and I've read that it's hit or miss with that CPU's memory controller (it can degrade performance if it's constantly having to resend data due to errors). I'd try to set it to 2666 Mhz if possible, even just as a test to see if that helps improve things. If it's already set at that then it's probably fine to leave as is.

Outside of that, the only "limiting" factor here is just the CPU is a bit older, from 2017; it still turbos up to 3.7Ghz (one core, or 3.2Ghz all cores) and has 8 cores, so that's still relatively fast for just file transfers from disk to RAM for loading purposes. I'd check the stuff mentioned above, and link like a video if you could (just so I could see how long it's taking) to help demonstrate if it's like a specific area or just a more general thing. I'm not sure how old the disk is either, but there's always the possibility it's going bad too, but that's like the last thing to consider since that wouldn't be specific to just one game or anything and it's generally very noticeable on SSDs.

As a matter of fact when R7 1700 came out 3000Mhz was the standard and when you had luck and dual channel you could push it to 3200Mhz.
My CPU is not really good sample so I run it stock and my RAM is at 2933Mhz because it's stable, going for 3000 or 3200Mhz is not stable on my configuration.
I run 2933Mhz on RAM for years and never really had a problem with the RAM stability.
For example Elden Ring (which minimum requirements I do not meet with my CPU, well at least at launch) loads really well.
The NVMEs are limited by the slots, but I really don't have loading issues in other titles, as you can see here in these benchmarks.

[Nekomian]

Warframe likes to do a lot of spot loading or other various things because it's live service / multiplayer, as opposed to single player titles that can batch load and optimize this a bit more easily. It's packages are also compressed and encrypted, so it'll need sufficient CPU time to transfer, decrypt, and uncompress it all at runtime, and lots of times it'll even pull in extra data it might not use for "just in case" reasons to avoid random spot loading if possible, since this can cause stutters / freezing, even if it can't resolve this completely. They could definitely make this process a lot more streamlined and efficient, because I recall plains of eidolon taking like 2 mins to load on an HDD on a system in 2016 or 2017 when I played that and it was horrendous.

It also has to sync data with teammates if in a squad, to pull in additional resources they may have too; this is sorta why I asked for a video, because it could be "loading" by just waiting for another player to tell you "hey, I have this ephemera on, load this" or some weird network hiccup that's preventing it from proceeding. I'd need more context to know for certain.

I can tell your drives are also very full, which may impact writes to them; this shouldn't be an issue in this case (it's mainly just doing reads really, with regular but small writes to logging), but I'd try to free up some space (generally the consensus is 90% full or less, to leave space for zero'd areas). I'd also recommend trimming the drives in something like disk defrag if possible, the worst case scenario I'm seeing is quite low (I doubt there's many Q1T1 scenarios occurring to be fair) so we just wanna help any reads and writes we can.

For reference by the way, my 970 evo plus seems to load most open world content in about 10s and everything else in about 5s. If there's players in the squad, it can honestly vary and even go to 30s depending on how long it's taking for them to load or for communications to sync. I'm not sure how long it's taking for you, or what the expected time would be. Unrelated, but I'd like to see Warframe incorporate DirectStorage APIs for further performance improvements tbh.

[GamezombieLP]

Random reads are not really that bad and it looks like it's not far from other benchmarks.
This should not be an issue.
I'll try to move the game to SN750, will see if things improve.

[GamezombieLP]

It was pretty decent... Until it was not. It must be a bug. Memory leak maybe not, but something similar.

[Nekomian]

I don't doubt there may be some minor memory leak or optimizations that they could make to Duviri content streaming, but it shouldn't be that noticeable (or affect other game modes / areas) or it would be more of an issue present on forums (I can only find one or two other "slow loading" posts on forums and they seem to be resolved, and all the ones on reddit generally seem to be fixed by switching DX versions or optimizing from launcher, which people apparently like to skip a lot and tbh should just be mandatory).

I think this is more of an issue that's specific to your system or configuration if others aren't experiencing it, but I still don't know how long your loading times are in seconds. I listed mine for comparison with the model number, I'm not sure how long it takes others on equivalent hardware to load in. If you wanna see how it's loading in real time (or from a previous session), the logs in '%LOCALAPPDATA%/Warframe' directory have output for what loads when and how long it takes.

[GamezombieLP]

Normally it loads in 5 to 8 seconds or so, but after few hours of playing it can get to 30 and more and sometimes it does not load at all.

[Nekomian]

3 hours ago, GamezombieLP said:

after few hours of playing it can get to 30 and more and sometimes it does not load at all

OK, so the 5 - 8s is about normal; after a few hours, if you pull the FPS counter up (the in-game one) what do the memory values listed look like? If they're excessively high (4000MB / 5000MB) then it's likely a memory leak, but if not then it's probably something else.